Last Monday, Andrew Fry presented the dot com bust which, very much affected our area of the Puget Sound. I have heard of this before but never truthfully have known what happened. It was interesting to find out what had happened, especially after having all this new knowledge of business and actually being able to understand it. How the businesses got investors for being a dot com seemed way to easy... it was like they were asking for the bust. I guess that I really don't understand why people were investing so much money in it... I guess that it could be since the Internet was new and it was a new idea that a person across the world could see this website and that it might get more attention and sales than just being a normal store on the street because the store can only reach the people in the area. My parents were one of those people who had AOL with that dial up and the "you got mail". Till a few months ago my parents were still paying for this and they have had Comcast cable Internet for years now... After I had found out that they were still paying for AOL it took me forever to explain to them that they didn't have to pay just to have an email account through AOL and that they are actually paying for the dial up that they were not using anymore.
I liked the dinosaur representations of the different Internet providers, made it a little more interesting.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
9. A visit from Michele Armstrong
Michele Armstrong is a Sr. Manager of corporate Recruiting at Vulcan Inc. On the recruiting side of things she talked about how to build your team. This was probably one of my favorite speeches from this class because she mainly discussed how to approach getting a job. One thing that I found that was interesting is that she said to weigh all the factors like benefits, not just pay. But it seems that most jobs that I have found online in my job hunting is they basically make sure that the pay range is out in the open and if you want to find out the benefits, if any, you may need to contact them. She also gave us a kind of cool trick where if you are looking for an internship and a company is looking to hire a similar, higher up position as a job, they will most likely be looking to hire within the company but they still put the post up and check a few interviews first. If that is the case, I should contact them and say that if they hire within the company and if they will be looking for an intern to contact me. I have also never thought to check crags list for jobs, I have always thought of it as a place to find used stuff but after checking they have quite a few listings. I never thought that online job places charged so much to businesses to put job postings... ten thousand a year... Well, when I go job hunting this spring I feel that I have some good tools to use.
Monday, March 1, 2010
--Business Plan update--
A little over half done at the moment, I will update about what my plan is when I have more time.
8. A visit from Derek Young
Derek Young is a pretty interesting entrepreneur who really likes to start company's. In fact, every time that Andrew Fry sees him, he is on the way to starting a new company. Everything that he seems to start doesn't really seem that it connects together in the since that he probably just enjoys starting businesses.
One thing that I thought that was kind of interesting is when one of his businesses is not doing well that he just lets it go. This is in a bit of contradiction of one of our previous speakers who said that if you want investors, you need a bit of skin in the game so that when the going gets tough that you don't just drop the business. Although, I think that he tries to put most of the money into the business. But also I guess that he does deal with difficult times if he has only started to be in to positive side for exit133 after putting tens of thousands into it.
When he tried to explain the business "Seasonal View" I felt so confused. I think that I started to understand it at one point which it is something to do with helping different departments of the same company link together to communicate. I want to quote him on one part because it made the most sense about that company Seasonal View(probably not exact to his words but close)- "If you have to ask us what we do you will never hire us, you come to us because you know what we do and need our services".
I liked the idea of suite 133 in the since that if I want to start a company that it would be a place to go if I need office space. The site is pretty simple for it though, I guess that there isn't too much to say about it but at least it isn't difficult to figure out what the price is. I also noticed that his business of Seasonal View was in the bottom portion of it where it tells you who the members are.
I was a little confused on Exit 133 about how he was paying people for the articles they would write before the site had any ads or anything that would show profit. I guess that I was also confused about why would people have a deadline to write a blog post unless the people who are blogging are more of employees instead of people blogging.
One thing that I thought that was kind of interesting is when one of his businesses is not doing well that he just lets it go. This is in a bit of contradiction of one of our previous speakers who said that if you want investors, you need a bit of skin in the game so that when the going gets tough that you don't just drop the business. Although, I think that he tries to put most of the money into the business. But also I guess that he does deal with difficult times if he has only started to be in to positive side for exit133 after putting tens of thousands into it.
When he tried to explain the business "Seasonal View" I felt so confused. I think that I started to understand it at one point which it is something to do with helping different departments of the same company link together to communicate. I want to quote him on one part because it made the most sense about that company Seasonal View(probably not exact to his words but close)- "If you have to ask us what we do you will never hire us, you come to us because you know what we do and need our services".
I liked the idea of suite 133 in the since that if I want to start a company that it would be a place to go if I need office space. The site is pretty simple for it though, I guess that there isn't too much to say about it but at least it isn't difficult to figure out what the price is. I also noticed that his business of Seasonal View was in the bottom portion of it where it tells you who the members are.
I was a little confused on Exit 133 about how he was paying people for the articles they would write before the site had any ads or anything that would show profit. I guess that I was also confused about why would people have a deadline to write a blog post unless the people who are blogging are more of employees instead of people blogging.
7. A visit from Bruce Kendall
I loved hearing this guy talk. His voice was well projected and it felt that he had a lot of information to share. Based on this I would say that he does a lot of public speaking. He works at pierce county's Economic Development Bored as the CEO. I guess that what the board does is try to grow jobs and wealth but I believe what their main concentration here is to try and get more money from out of area to come into the Puget Sound area. They do this because they want to increase the economic opportunity for the citizens and businesses of the area. He talked about all the different clusters of jobs in Washington where some of the information was kinda cool to know. The map that he showed us displayed how quickly the job is advancing in the area with the amount of people that they are taking as well as the size of how many people are currently in that field. There are probably a few other aspects to that map but I can't think of them for the life of me. I guess that I would like to know the more current standings on this job since it is a pretty different ballpark nowadays with the bad economy. The big five clusters of jobs are Aerospace (mainly from Boeing but I think that he mentioned that there are possibly a few other small company's in the area), Clean Tech (I am actually glad to see that this is one of the big five because it is something that businesses should strive for), Information Tech.(good that this is up here since this is the field that I will be in), Life Sciences, and Logistics and informational trade. Don't forget the plus two(guess that they really wanted more than five) Defence contractors and corporate Headquarters.
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